With help from Sweden, 4 Northern Virginia families are Climate Pilots

If Americans really take the plunge and enter a carbon-constrained world, it might look a little like the Stokes family’s home in Falls Church.

Nolan Stokes and Kathy Harman-Stokes — a financial planner and a lawyer with two children in elementary school — are installing a geothermal heat pump in their front yard that will tap the Earth’s constant temperature to warm their home more efficiently. They know precisely how many kilowatts of energy their house is consuming when they wake up each morning. And they’ve cut back on their consumption of meat because they now know it generates significantly more greenhouse-gas emissions than vegetables.

There’s even an official name for the Stokeses, along with three other households in Northern Virginia: They are Climate Pilots, guinea pigs in a Swedish experiment aimed at helping U.S. citizens understand that a lifestyle that curbs greenhouse-gas emissions is not necessarily oppressive, just different. Whether Americans are willing to follow their example is part of the political calculation lawmakers have to make as they consider imposing nationwide limits on emissions in legislation making its way through Congress.

The Climate Pilots program exemplifies the broader dynamics at play in the international climate debate: Europeans impatiently nudging the United States and other countries toward a less carbon-intensive lifestyle.

Washington Post